Canemorto | Fish Market | New York

Canemorto represents a unique case in the creative collaboration genre. Behind a single name there are in fact three artists who think and act as one three-headed creature. Starting from high school, where they met over fifteen years ago, their complicity has evolved gradually over the years becoming a working method, which allows them to interact from the conception to the execution of each individual project. It is a partnership that is decidedly against the tide, in a world that tents to imply roles and titles, that is based on identifying, distinguishing and paying tribute to uniqueness and personal value and that thus, by disclosing the line-up at the helm of groups, systems, ideas or companies, wants to make the scope of their projects and purposes appear more solid and credible. On the contrary, uniqueness, recognizability or credibility are just eyewash for Canemorto, since the trio likes to remain anonymous and act clandestinely, free to mix what’s credible and what’s unacceptable, compliance and disobedience, design and improvisation.

The trio choose, not by accident, to label itself with a name that in colloquial Italian stays for “loser”, “inoffensive”, “insignificant”. This way the insidious gradient of ambiguity, non-reliability and elusiveness that is part and parcel of the game, gets enhanced. It is also a tripartite practice of painting, drawing or engraving on the same medium or context, sign or meaning. A collective practice on which they practiced well. First of all in the street, moving fast with their skateboards and intervening together, surreptitiously, in the territory, always invisible and at the limits of legality. Invasive, mockingand impudent, the modus Canemorto has not changed over time. On the contrary, it has become more precise, if possible, increasingly enriched with gambles, provocations, playful and sophisticated challenges to the status quo. Inspiring trespassing in various language areas their tag remains the same they choose back then, in 2007. As it stays the same their desire to remain anonymous and hide their faces with a cagoule during performances, talks and other public appearances. The trio’s rules are well established, they’ve applied and shared them full-time for years now, turning them into the foundations of their way of making art, a liminal, clandestine and mocking way of intervening and interfering, contrasting and counterposing. To confront the system and to confront themselves.

Born and raised in Brianza, North of Milan, they get each other instantly since forever, they know deeply their common cultural background, the ways of thinking, speaking and joking, proper to the metropolitan suburbs where they all come from. It is an affinity that fuelled their shared keenness to irony and self-irony, their communication in Canemortish, a slang they like to use in public which is perfectly comprehensible to them, but not to others. An affinity that is at the origin of the close complicity that binds them and has made them a single, living, inseparable entity. The figures and imagery of art history are always in the air. Canemorto likes to evoke them in its freestyle interactions of primitive and post-human, tradition and improvisation: Matisse and manga define its style. The infinite declination of landscapes, still lifes, human and animal figures, which become works on the wall or on an easel, hung in a frame or mounted on wheels and remote-controlled like racing cars, kneaded and baked like pizzas in a wood-burning oven, or preserved like fish in oil or frozen, tattooed on the skin of fans or would-be collectors and otherwise printed or embroidered on knits and fabrics… 

But the practices they like to devote themselves to do not certainly end here, in fact they orbit around wall painting, board games, performance, video, soundtrack, screenplay and styling of their own productions. Eclecticism and encroachment are not new to art, for sure, but what makes Canemorto’s modus operandi exhilarating and terroristic is certainly its contemporary imprint. It is a way of centrifuging knowledge and tastes that calls us into question, downplays and ridicules myths or scales of value. It confronts metropolitan suburbs and high finance, and breaks down the demarcations between conditioning and unconditional freedom, consumerism and imaginative dispossession. If art, from the Maia to the 20th Century, has changed society, the public, the way of thinking, seeing and living with a variety of non-aligned and highly shocking choices, Canemorto certainly loves this tradition of daring and visionary follies and makes them its own, elaborating them in a work that becomes a spin-off of the existing and the already existed, a brilliant narrative circumvolution.

LA PESCHERIA DA CANEMORTO  – Canemorto’s fish shop – (subheading: GLI STILI PIÙ FRESCHI IN CITTÀ – The freshest styles in town -) is tailor made for Milan, the first Italian city for imported fish from the Mediterranean Sea and with numerous retails outlets. I remember that the project, as soon as the three of them announced it to me, stirred my enthusiasm right away, a lot of curiosity and great expectations. I couldn’t imagine hiw far would they go, after previous works such as LA PIZZERIA DA CANEMORTO – Canemorto’s Pizzeria– set up in 2017 in Ghent, Belgium, at KapOw, a cultural space transformed for the occasion in a typical Italian restaurant with the three artists busy making dog’s head shaped pizzas. Or after CANEMORTO EN PLEIN AIR, a solo exhibition shown in 2023 with a video by Marco Proserpio, where the painting becomes a pretext for a reconnaissance of the Sunday painters world, of competitions for amateurs with prizes, of landscapes painted outdoors on easels in a few hours, of the money that moves the big and small wheels of the art world.

Art in the fish shop surely didn’t disappoint me, quite the contrary! I would say that it bordered the unthinkable with all its faithful reproductions: the shop furnishings and the sales, the rubber aprons and paper cones with the logo, the numbered queue for purchases and the till to pay for them. In a city, like Milan, where the fish business is far superior to that of contemporary art, Canemorto’s provocation appears glaringly obvious. Open only three days, from the 19th to the 23rd of May 2023, their fish shop has confronted the audience with fried drawings cuoppi, tartare of drawings, raw drawings, dried drawings, frozen, desquamated, filleted drawings and more, striking at the heart of the consumerist demon of the bystanders, who did not turn away. Shopping became a game, like the many that Canemorto set up around. In Venice, during the last Biennale, where it drew the night-time audience with clandestine gambling games with decks of artist’s cards made obviously ad hoc. Or else toilet paper games, rolls that the three Canemorto reproduce duly disguised in various poses and situations as if they were photo albums, in the project conceived for Jacopo Benassi’s FBI Foundation, based in the cabinet of his studio in La Spezia. It is my favorite kind of art, the one that makes you think, undermines your certainties and becomes guerrilla. Even more so when the plot does not lack its own context, its own presentation, a cathartic form of theatricality. And, lo and behold! it also makes you laugh.

Text by Mariuccia Casadio